The reason that games are even hosted on “official” servers like these is to ensure the company can take the game down once the devs run out of time o the contract they made for all the IP’s they use in said game. Otherwise its possible AND has been done before to let the players machines spin up a server each match.
That could be one reason, at least in a game such as MultiVersus with different IPs being used.
But they still lock down servers to their own shit when they own it all anyway and it’s because they also sell you crap to have in the game. If you had your own server, you could just give yourself the stuff they sell since all those things are still in the game somewhere and the only barrier between you and the content is their servers checking to see if you paid for them.
This game leaves behind a legacy of extremely funny poor decisions and mistakes, culminating in becoming one of the few games that got to be shut down twice.
Games as a Service wasn’t even the fatal flaw here. Brawlhalla is another platform fighter that is doing just fine off that model. The dev team for MultiVersus just couldn’t handle the project, for one reason or another.
A lot of speculation on the specifics of what went wrong, plenty of players looking for who to blame, but there will probably never be any reliable or concrete info on what exactly happened.
This game could have easily been another Marvel Rivals. An absolute success using its strong IPs in a game type that is underrepresented. There's no other big name doing Smash Bros style combat, and definitely not outside of Nintendo's platform. The elements were all there to make this a successful game, but they completely blew the execution.
Another problem is the game director overhyping and saying “any character is possibile” and he wasn’t limiting it to warner bros’s IPs but if you’re going to do that, then they honestly should have made the game launch with at least one 3rd party character.
Just another 8-10 years before we get to play it guys!
Seriously, though. I don’t know how you one-up the first game. I’ve been replaying it and I’m just constantly in awe at the number of hidden little gems to go explore.
I just found out the text messages you get from Club Riot are for actual events in world and not just flavor text. I haven’t dug into it, but it almost sounded like they had multiple sets of music for the different artists. Just so many little details.
I would be 100% ok with it being on the same level as the first, just with a different story, characters, etc. Hell, they could reuse 90% of the city as well.
Pondsmith revealed that he’s not as involved with the second game as he was with 2077, but said he’s keeping track of its progress. The game designer went on to claim that the sequel will feature Night City, as well as a second, unspecified location.
So it’ll have a new city as well as Night City. Which is good - Night City has more stories to tell. All the TTRPGs were based in NC, as was Edgerunners. Leaving it behind completely would be wrong.
They did do a lot of teasing of the moon and the Crystal Palace space station, but there are also signs in-game about a high-speed rail line to Chicago opening in 2080. So the “Chicago but wrong” descriptor might be exactly what it says on the tin.
It’s going to feature a new city as a second location. Night City will still be there in some way, as the story of Cyberpunk is mostly about Night City. If it didn’t have Night City, it would still be cyberpunk, but it wouldn’t be Cyberpunk.
If CDPR hadn’t forced the team to crunch to get the game running at all on PlayStation, it probably would have been much more polished on release. A lot of the bugs you see in YouTube glitch compilations were due to this over-optimization (like NPCs vanishing or changing models when you looked away for a second).
I wonder how much better the game and its reception would have been if they’d dropped the last-gen console support during development. Those were the truly awful versions; the PC version was about even with Bethesda’s launch day jank.
I also wish they’d properly managed expectations. The PC release was buggy and missing promised features, yes, but a lot of the hate came from it being a game with an open-world city with guns and driving but not mimicking GTA’s systems.
Could you remind me what features people were upset about? I stayed away from most of the drama since CDPR has a long history of releasing a free major upgrade a year or two after release that fixes everything people complained about.
I remember the dev diaries being pretty open about dropping features during development, like the RC drone turning from a staple of your kit into something shown off once in a mission and immediately forgotten.
Well for one, they had the whole thing about how every NPC would have a full dynamic daily routine to make the city feel alive, and the actual result was, for example, them just walking to and from the metro for 24 hours straight lol
It’s still like that though, the city just feels like it’s just a bunch of npcs standing around. 3am? Same people just wandering around or sitting/leaning somewhere. I really don’t know of a game that has any dynamic npc systems. It’s all just scripted a to b and that’s it.
I don’t think that the NPC behaviour was the problem but the fact that they promised more. The NPCs didn’t feel significantly different to those in other games for me.
That’s true, I think those who didn’t follow the dev cycle and ate into the hype probably enjoyed the game a ton more than those of us who did and then got the absolute trash day one launch.
There is a HUGE compilation on the subreddit for cyberpunk2077, but basically we got promised a vast, in depth RPG and instead got something mechanically on part with GTA Vice City and Call of Duty
Some people complain very loudly. It’s possible most of us actually had no problems & said nothing, leaving only the scorned to be heard.
So, believe it or not, what you said is why I was responding. To let you know “that performance issues are different for different people on different systems.” Seems like you forgot it yourself.
In your article it talks about how performance was bad on old consoles systems. This is where the refunds were mostly provided. ON PC, many users did not have this issue.
As you stated everyones PC is different. There’s no gaslighting. You are just conflating statements.
From your article:
“Despite good reviews on PC, the console version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not meet the quality standard we wanted it to meet,”
Your statement directly conflict with the article you shared.
Well, after playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve got no shortage of ideas. I really enjoyed Cyberpunk, but “this is the strength option” and “this is the hacker option” are nothing compared to how BG3 lets you come up with your own solutions through its systems.
I’ve held multiple times before that it possibly would have been better off if it were a more focused, linear experience possibly akin to how the newer Deus Ex games worked. Within those you had the freedom to screw around in the area/mission you were in and given a wide latitude to complete things as you saw fit, but it definitely excised the wannabe GTA filler in the middle.
2077 had an excellent series of incredibly well-directed moments, both within the main story missions as well as several notable side missions, but the stuff in between made little sense especially given the story framework of V living on borrowed time with a ticking bomb in their head. But sure, let’s save up and buy nine apartments, collect all the gold class weapons, stock your garage with all the cars, traipse all over down finding all of Delamain’s rogue taxis, do a sidequest for this random chump, see a concert, check all these cyberpsychos off our list…
There is incredible detail in the world if – but only if – you stop to search for it. There are a lot of things most players will probably miss unless they’re specifically pointed out, and while that’s certainly neat it also means that the lack of discoverability means the time spent on many of those details ultimately turns out to be wasted. 2077 is thus a weird hybrid of a linear and open world game and as a result feels both too constrained and to unfocused at the same time. It’s all to easy to get derailed, and alas to some extent you have to let yourself get derailed to accrue enough XP and equipment so you don’t get your ass handed to you if you just try to stick to the main storyline, even though that storyline is written as if it’s supposed to be a single linear narrative.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the game. I just would have presented it much differently if I were in charge.
I can see this perspective, for sure. I definitely didn’t click with this game quite as much with the first go through, but it was the second time where I wanted to build something specific and get into the world more that I had a lot more fun.
You definitely have to suspend your disbelief with the “ticking time bomb” and I wish the story canonically allowed for exploration after the ending, but I also see how that wouldn’t work that well with some of the endings.
I think they ultimately had to choose their battles and I’m hoping for a bit less of that in the sequel if anything.
Probably update 2.00. They completely redid the game balance, about half of the damn RPG stat related mechanics, and reworked a decent chunk of the iconic weapon effects.
Notably, they removed the Overwatch sniper’s wall piercing. Intentionally. There’s mods to revert that.
Spicy take: I hope they dump 2077’s engine and go Unreal.
I recently followed this guide to try and set up “optimized” path tracing (no raster lighting, with everything raytraced) in 2077, and on my lowly RTX 3090 it runs like cold molasses. Not a chance. Raster + RT reflections is all I can manage, and it looks… good.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been playing Satisfactory (an Unreal Engine game from a comparatively microscopic studio), and holy moly. Unreal Engine’s dynamic lighting looks scary good. Like, I get light bounces and reflections and everything, and it runs at like quadruple the FPS in hilariously complex areas, again, with a fraction of the dev effort.
Cryengine in KCD2 is rather sick as well, though probably less tuned for urban landscapes.
…So why don’t they save a few years and many millions, and just go with one of those instead of poorly reinventing the wheel?
Multiversus was one of the most mismanaged projects I’ve seen. Released in open beta for months, shut down for a year, re-released as literally the same game but worse and with more microtransactions, then quickly died.
I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You’ll see this again with 2XKO, even if they’ve got a year’s worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.
It really sucked because Smash Bros is basically the only other big platform fighter on the market. Multiversus was set up to actually be a viable alternative to smash, it was massively popular at first, and they had such an amazing library of characters to pull from. The game had everything going for it. And they just blew it. So badly.
The beta was fun, although the monetization was bad even back then.
But the official release made all the wrong decisions to amplify the worst parts of gameplay and dial up the monetization. It was like they got all the player feedback backwards.
The Nickelodeon fighter game is still available I believe, but you’re still right in that there’s still basically nothing to hold a candle to Smash Bros.
I bought the first Nickelodeon game a couple months after it released, and the online was already dead, I literally couldn’t find a match. Just went ahead and got a refund on it.
Just looking up what ‘preproduction’ actually means : They are in the planning stages, but they haven’t started ‘making’ the game yet. Cyberpunk (1) development took four years.
Thats a fallacy. You’re essentially saying because one company was able to fix their shit, the systemic problem isnt real. Thats not the case. Look at the broader picture. Companies are consolidating, building massive conglomerates and the market is hostile towards its customers.
No the systemic problem is real, but I don’t think this one independent company has succumbed fully to it yet. If they had, they wouldn’t have fixed it as well as they did.
Thats what I’m saying too. The reason they released it in the state they did was market pressure and most likely bad decisions in an abusive capitalist system. Thats the reason why I said it initially.
I really enjoyed it and didn’t experience any bugs as I waited for it to be sorted. It was also one of the rare games that held my attention long enough to finish, so that’s probably why I think highly of it. Love that I’m being downvoted! I’ll know not to bother contributing my opinion next time.
Most likely not since it will be made in Unreal Engine 5, though since everyone at CDProjektRed is working on Witcher 4, Unreal Engine 6 might be out and what the games made with. There were many reasons why CP2077 was broken as it was at launch, but one of the main reasons was due to using their own game engine and a ton of effort trying to support last Gen consoles.
The worst i hear is its games tend to be kinda unoptimized, but how much of that is the devs not being given enough time to optimize the game before release and how much is just the engine being bad idk. I used UE4 a lot and it was pretty smooth sailing for the most part, but maybe 5 got worse in some aspects.
Good god, just let it die already. Pass the reins on to someone who can actually make a decent CyberPunk game. I do not trust CDPR to make entertaining games anymore.
What? The launch was definitely botched, but after all the updates it’s now a great game. Personally one of my favorites. Honestly I’m not sure if there are many studios who would do a better job than CDPR in making such a large scale Cyberpunk game.
I’m really not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about the game at release, or after they patched in all the intended content?
Outside of what I assume you mean by the “scripted gameplay” of the main story there are dozens upon dozens of side quests and weird little points of interest to discover (well over a hundred, easily). A lot of them help to elaborate on the setting in interesting ways. What exactly were you expecting that the game didn’t deliver on?
Go play Deus Ex in the same genre, or some cyberpunk based CRPGs. Those games lots of mechanics that play into the game, DXMD’s Augment system wipes it’s ass with Cyberpunk’s Chrome for one.
Also it would help if they didn’t rush the story so much, it was a product of crunch and it shows. You can fix the bugs but you can’t fix fundamental problems with pacing
None of what you’ve just said connects back to your previous comment in the slightest. You started by saying that they cut too much from the TTRPG and that the world was too shallow, and then when I asked you to elaborate you just went on about augmentation systems.
At this point I’m not convinced you actually know what it is that you don’t like about it.
It still has some rough edges, even after the major updates. I liked the Panam ending a lot, arguably one of my favorite game endings ever, but the police spawn and logic is still terrible compared to the likes of older GTA games, and the cars still feel gross to drive. Just Cause 2 had better vehicle handling, and that’s a title from 2010.
Me here just waiting to also not play the next one.
It’s just another flavor of starfield but somehow so much more shittier. Make me a game that doesn’t release looking like it’s a beta release. Then I may be interested.
In fairness is was full jank on release, the initial patches got it to “bethesda jank” where it was fun with the bugs (provided you could actually play it) but still bug ridden.
It got better over time, until just before the “big patch” came in that fully changed how it all worked skills and mechanics wise (gameplay was mostly the same).
Honestly i prefer, pre-“big patch” but the fully patched game is considerably smoother and more coherent.
So, aside from the years of post release development, completely missing features that are never actually coming (looking at you full transit system), it’s actually pretty good.
An absolutely dogshit way of releasing a game, but if you waited for a few years and bought it on discount , it’s actually a really fun game (provided you like that sort of thing).
TBC I’m not justifying anything about this process , it was a major fuckup and many other dev houses would have gone under from the weight of how badly they fucked it up, but they had that witcher money, so.
largely seamless world, fun combat, hand crafted locations, good writing, good story, good and memorable characters, engaging dialogs, multiple ways to finish quests, cool vehicles, and on and on…
oh and forget forcing the player to fast travel everywhere but traveling around in cyberpunk is actually fun so i pretty much never used it in the game despite having the option.
and it looks like no one directed any part of starfield, it’s literally the same as oblivion in terms of how every encounter and dialog unfolds, while starfield actually has direction and variety, well acted and performance captured interactive scenes. here’s a good comparison of two similar quests involving a trade with shady people. just compare how the lines are delivered, how dynamic the scenes are, what happens when threats are involved, whether the scenes have any development, what you can see when the boxes are opened, literally everything.
videogameschronicle.com
Aktywne